Everyone aspires to be happy in life. Emotions are a spectrum and happiness is the most desirable one. But can not being happy become a crime? The Doctor has visited a few societies in the future where unhappiness is illegal. This dystopian and authoritarian vision of the future is one of many political allegories explored in Doctor Who over the decades. For most of my life, I have been unhappy. But now that I have made Doctor Who my whole life in Cardiff, I may finally have a chance of being truly happy at last.

The Happiness Patrol

★★★★☆

TX: 02/11/1988 – 16/11/1988

Written by Graeme Curry      Directed by Chris Clough

On the planet Terra Alpha, happiness is compulsory on pain of death. Terra Alpha is ruled over by the tyrannical Helen A, a character based on Margaret Thatcher. The authoritarian society is policed by the Happiness Patrol who arrest or kill anyone that displays any sign of unhappiness. The Seventh Doctor and Ace arrive on Terra Alpha and the TARDIS is painted pink by the Happiness Patrol! Killjoys are sent to be executed by the Kandy Man, a robot made of sweets. Alternative fates include being made to join the Happiness Patrol, which is what Ace is enlisted to do. The Doctor confronts the dictator Helen A and convinces her that sadness is vital for a society to thrive. The Doctor demonstrates this when Helen A grieves over the death of her dog Fifi. This story is a satire on Margaret Thatcher’s government in the 1980s. My late grandparents (my dad’s parents) were both lifelong Conservatives and they met Margaret Thatcher in the 1950s and they thought that she was “a ghastly woman”! I hated Margaret Thatcher and I hate the Tories! Doctor Who has featured many attacks on Margaret Thatcher, notably in The Christmas Invasion, which contained an allegory for her aggressive sinking of the General Belgrano during the Falklands War of 1982. Russell T Davies also took a swipe at Margaret Thatcher in It’s a Sin. The Happiness Patrol also contains allegories for the abhorrent Section 28 legislation passed by Margaret Thatcher’s government at the time. The Happiness Patrol also examines the problematic concept of regime change. Regime change is a controversial foreign policy. However, there is no denying that various dictators around the world who have been removed from power by the West were evil men, i.e. Saddam Hussein and Colonel Gaddafi. The character of the Kandy Man was subject to a legal dispute between the BBC and Bertie Bassett’s owing to the similarity of the character’s design. 

Smile

★★☆☆☆

TX: 22/04/2017

Written by Frank Cottrell-Boyce   Directed by Lawrence Gough

The Twelfth Doctor takes his new companion Bill Potts to the far future to a human colony. The colony is empty except for millions of nanobots called the Vardy and also some robots called Emojibots. The Emojibots give people disks that display their emotions. If people display signs of unhappiness, they are killed by the Vardy (a similar concept to The Happiness Patrol), which was the fate of the unfortunate early colonists who have been turned into fertiliser. Smiling makes you happy, but in this episode of Doctor Who it keeps you alive! I love telling women to smile or beg before I cum on their face. Resolving to destroy the Vardy before the arrival of the unsuspecting colonists, the Doctor locates the ship that brought the pre-colony crew to the planet and plans on overloading its reactor. However, Bill discovers a young boy who leads her to a large number of hibernation chambers including some humans just awaking; the Doctor realises that this is the colony ship. The pair review the ship’s logs from the non-hibernating flight crew. The Vardy were programmed to help construct and operate the colony and make the colonists happy, monitoring the emotional state of the colonists through the emotion badges and avatars. When one of the flight crew died of natural causes, it created grief among the crew, something the avatars were not programmed to register. The Vardy took this as a sign of disease and killed those who displayed unhappiness. This created a “grief tsunami” which rapidly wiped out the flight crew, and will likely wipe out the waking colonists when they discover what happened. The colonists believe they must combat the Vardy to protect their hibernating crew, while the Vardy start to show the beginnings of sentience through self-defence. Failing to dissuade them from fighting, the Doctor resolves the situation by “resetting” the Vardy to their original state, before they saw grief as a disease. The Doctor offers to help negotiate between the colonists and Vardy to avoid the same mistake. Later, the Doctor and Bill return to Earth, but find themselves on the frozen Thames as an elephant looks on. This episode leads directly into the events of Thin Ice, in a similar manner to a 1960s William Hartnell episode cliffhanger ending.